Customer experience: A lesson in what NOT to do

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Thinking about getting a Kindle Fire 7 for you children?  Hold up for a moment and read this first, it may just change your mind. Plus why this matters if you run an ecommerce business (or any kind of business that has customers) – it has something to do with user experience.

Customer experience: A lesson in what NOT to do

You know those times when you have a gut instinct about something?  Well my advice is you listen to it.

You see, I’m a Google gal, through and through (except I do still work off a mac, but the rest of my devices are run by Google).

I love the ease and simplicity of it all and also the logic of how it works - like, don’t get me started on ios photos and how they’re saved 🤯.

My business works off Google with GDrive and all my documents and client work are saved in Docs.

(If you’re curious about how to use GDoc as your landing page before you have a website set up - here’s on of my video tutorials - this has strangely garnered quite a few views, so I’m putting it here since it seems a popular one.)

So when it came time to buy my kids a tablet for school work I thought about getting a new Lenovo - a simple, budget friendly tablet that I could sync with my Google account. 

Yet when I went to my local store, I got convinced that a Kindle Fire was a better option. It wasn’t a hard sell, I listened to the benefits of the Fire and it sounded like there was more parental control with Fire and the guy was so adamant about how good it was.  So that was me sold - I’m happy to listen to others who have expertise in areas I don’t.

As you can probably guess, my experience with the Kindle Fire was not particularly great, and I wish I had stayed with my gut instinct to go with a Google, but I learned a lot about user experience from this little experiment. Although I didn’t see it as a n experiment at the time… hello frustrated hours tearing my hair out and going back and forth with customer service from the store I bought it from.

I’d also like to just note that I’m very savvy when it comes to tech so I was dumbfounded with my experience with the Fire and how illogical the interface was.

Why I wouldn’t recommend a Kindle Fire 7

First off, setting up the account on Kindle Fire for a kid requires an adult account, but I didn’t realise this at first so I set my kids up with their own accounts and then realised my mistake so I had to go back and start afresh otherwise the account would be an adult one.

You then have to download apps to your adult account to then share with kids, so for both tablets I had to keep toggling between adult and child account to make that work. And there was not way to just add a normal browser to the device so my kids could research for school. Of course I wanted Chrome but any dang browser would have been fine, but nope, not available, just a weird search interface that didn’t yield logical results.

When it comes to using the Fire with the kids account, the interface is so badly designed, it made me want to throw the tablet out of the window. All the apps (that you share form the adult account) just appear as icons randomly on the main home screen.  There’s no way to categorize them or have them in any logical order.

So with toggling back and forth between adult and kid accounts on BOTH devices (who has time for that?), and the totally illogical user interface that didn’t make any sense, I was more than a little disappointed.  I was going insane. So, overall it was a hugely frustrating experience

But hats off to Currys/ PC World for letting me switch over to the Lenovo. They were great when I had questions about how the Fire worked and even got them stumped when I was asking why certain things weren’t possible. Like I said I’m pretty tech savvy but, in the end, I had to return to store TWICE for guidance on how to make the basic operations of it work properly (even they couldn’t figure out how to make it work more intuitively).

The guy who had recommended it to me said there must have been an systems update as the interface was different from the one he used but I’ll forgive him because in the end all four store personnel agreed how rubbish the experience was as I showed them why I was so frustrated with it.

I’m so pleased with the Lenovo as it works just like any adult tablet.  The ONLY issue I have with it (and this isn’t the device but Google) is the kids version of YouTube.  This is another app with an interface so very illogical and the search function is terrible.  But apart from that (which I can live with) it’s fantastic because I can control the apps they download and access their accounts through GOogle family.

It’s nice that they also have a gmail address for the future. Once they turn 13 they’ll take full control of their accounts and it will be like their child restrictions never existed! All hail Google!

What I learned from this experience

So what have I learned from this experience and how does this relate to running an ecommerce business?

• My main takeaway is that gut instincts are rarely wrong. Trust your intuition when it comes to making decisions in life AND business.

• The user experience is critical. When thinking about how your customers interact with your brand, test out the journey to see what it’s like and try to put yourself in your customers shoes.  THat means testing the purchasing journey, the opt-in journey, the post purchase journey - all of this matters and will have a bearing on whether your customers become repeat customers (or whether they’ll opt for your competitor instead).

• Know beforehand what the criteria are for success. Whenever choosing a new business tool, or strategy, what are the requirements of that tool so that you can effectively make better decisions that minimise your investment in time, energy and money.

• Google is da bomb! (If you want Google Workspace, click that link and use the code U4XC3TYMJEG64MH to get 10% off the business plan for a year).